Heya Eric! Just my way of saying, “my posts are coming soon”. I’m looking forward to tossing out whatever I think might be useful or entertaining to people like us. Ooh, I can just feel the anticipation…

Google’s handing out phone numbers through their GrandCentral beta program. Some of the features their service has are Call Screening, ListenIn, (Hear why someone is calling before taking the call), Call Record, Block Callers, and email and SMS notifications of voicemails. They way it works is you are given a phone number based on the area you would like and can add up to 3 physical phone numbers to that parent number. Then you can setup which phone you want to ring based on who’s calling you. For example you may have friends and family routed to ring your home and cell phone. You can have work ring just your cell phone, and any unknown or specific number just go directly to voicemail. I haven’t given it a good try yet but will post more information after testing the service.

I also have 10 beta invites so let me know if you’d like to give it a try.

When upgrading a Windows NT 4.0 Server to Windows 2003 (R2 in my case) running under VMware you will run into a STOP 0x0000007b error when the machine tries to reboot into Windows 2003 for the first part of the setup. To get around this error you must download the VMware SCSI Disk Driver floppy image from VMware here. Mount this image as the floppy disk drive in your VM and restart the VM.

Make sure you change the boot order in the VM BIOS so Removable Devices is not your first boot option. Right after the selection screen for your Windows boot options start tapping F6 until you get to the screen stating that the following controllers were found:

At this point choose option ‘S’ to select a driver. The proper drivers will be on your virtual floppy image and you will see the selection for the VMWare SCSI drivers. Once selected your Windows setup will continue on it’s merry way.

I had a nice surprise from Charter over the weekend. I found that my downloads were almost twice as fast. It looks like they are finally starting to compete with Comcast and have upgraded the standard 3mb service to 5mb. They are still overpriced but at least this is a start.

I’ve finally installed my copy of Vista Ultimate that I’ve had for a few weeks. I was a bit apprehensive about it since I had a poor experience with Beta 2. My driving factor for installing was to share my media to my XBOX 360 upstairs. So I took the plunge, installed Vista and started playing with Media Center. Audio worked great and it found my entire music collection. Then I tried to play some XVID encoded videos. Audio but no video. No big deal, I just need to grab a new version of ffdshow. Downloaded, installed, time to try again. This time it shows me the thumbnail view for the video but when I try running the video it causes Media Center to crash. I tried playing a few other videos in Media Player which crashed in a similar fashion.

After an hour or so of trolling Google for an answer it finally dawned on me. I never installed any drivers for my hardware. I was just using the standard drivers included in Vista. I checked the display adapter and sure enough Vista had it listed as the Standard VGA driver. After installing the Vista specific Intel video drivers for my on board video everything ran as expected.

So, before using your system… make sure you finish setting it up.

I’ve had this happen to me a few times and each time it has been due to a corrupted calender or task item in my mobile device. The easiest way to correct this problem is to simply remove those folders from syncing with your device, perform a sync, then add them back to the device. It’s really quite easy to do.

Go to Active Sync on your Windows Mobile PC device.

Choose ‘Menu’, then ‘Configure Server’

Choose ‘Next’ until you reach the screen that has the listing of objects you’d like to sync and uncheck Calendar and Tasks.

Choose ‘Finish’

Now perform a sync. This will remove the corrupted entries from your mobile device. Once this is complete just check Calendar and Tasks again from the Configure Server option and perform another sync. This will place everything from the Exchange Server back onto your device and you shouldn’t get the dreaded 86000108 error.

Got an email from Google today regarding their hosted web services:

The start page
The start page lets you easily create a unique, dynamic place for your users to find relevant, essential information, preview their inboxes and calendars, and search the web. You customize the layout, header area and overall color scheme, as well as the page’s default content, which can include Google Personalized Homepage modules, your own content and links, and RSS feeds. After your users log in, they can further customize the start page so it’s just right. To create and publish your domain’s start page, log in to the control panel.

Support for new languages
We recently added a whole batch of new languages to the administrative control panel, so if English isn’t your native tongue, try Google Apps for Your Domain in any of these other languages: Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish or UK English. If you’d like to use the control panel in one of these languages, log in to the control panel and click ‘Domain Settings’ to edit advanced settings.

Custom URLs for your domain’s Google-powered apps
Now you can set up simple URLs on your own domain for your Google services. For example, your users could access their email accounts at mail.untangible.com. Log in to the control panel to edit these links.

Support for multiple domains
If your business or organization has other domain names in addition to untangible.com, you can now associate all of your domains together. This way, when emails and calendar event invitations are sent to accounts at your secondary domain name, the messages and invitations will be routed to the right accounts at untangible.com.

At any time, if you get stuck or if you want to tell us about your experience with this service, you can find more information and get in touch through our help center (https://www.google.com/support/a ).

Sincerely,
The Google Team

Looks like they’ve made some nice progression. I really like it that they’ve finally given the mail website a much easier to remember address.